Staf Verhaegen

The Retro-uC was a crowdfunding campaign for an open source silicon project. One of the reasons the campaign did not attract enough people was a lack of enough attractive features. The feature set was kept minimal to allow a first time right chip production. The choice of HDL is important to allow to implement more features with enough productivity and without increasing the risk of having buggy silicon. As will be presented, the venerable VHDL and Verilog RTL languages are not considered ideal for this purpose. In the quick talk an overview of pros and cons of some HDL investigated for further development will be presented.

Presentation about a micro-controller with the proper instruction set for the retro enthusiast and a pilot project to testing the grounds for an open silicon movement.

The Retro-uC is an fully open source microcontroller. It uses CPU cores that are battle tested in FPGA re-implementations of vintage computer systems. It implements the MOS6502 instruction set of Commodore 64 fame, the Z80 one of the ZX Spectrum and the Motorola 68000 of Amiga and Atari ST fame. For development, implementations running on FPGA boards are available and are available for interested retro people to use for their own development or as microcontroller. The final goal of the Retro-uC porject is to produce an ASIC by a crowdfunding campaign.

After giving an overview of the features and choices made like the memory map the author would like to get freedback from this talk on the compatibility of low volume chip production and retrocomputing.

This presentation will only very briefly discuss the implementation of the chip itself; that will be discussed more in depth in a presentation in the CAD and Open Hardware devroom.

The Chips4Makers project tries to make low volume ASICs possible for makers and hobbyists. The talk will start with a summary and vision of the Chips4Makers project.

In a second part of the talk the current state of the used tool chain will be discussed. With the Retro-uC project this tool chain is tested and it will be presented what worked and what is candidate for improvement. I do hope I can get feedback from the public and get more inspiration to improve the toolchain in use for future user projects.

The Retro-uC chip itself - a microcontroller with the right instruction set for a retrocomputing enthusiast - is discussed in a talk in the retrocomputing devroom.